Wednesday, December 11, 2013

An Empirical Assay of Unimaginative Floridian Nomenclature, Part I

I can't help but notice, as I drive up and down the winding streets of our fair state, just how ridiculously generic the names of most of the resorts, motels, hotels, and subdivisions are. I mean, you could write down every remotely-ocean-location-related word in the thesaurus on scraps of paper, then pick them two of them out of a hat, and the result would probably be a real existing actual place. I can be often heard shouting in the car while driving, with no one to hear me except the Ocho brothers on the dashboard, "Come on, people, show some imagination! You spent three quarters of a million dollars on this place and the best freakin' name you could come up with was "Sea Breeze"??"

I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. I mean, we can't expect everyplace to have as hip a name as El Presidente, but damn, y'all, let's try to be a cut above and at least try to come up with something a little less mundane and more memorable, mm'kay?

I should also note that most of these names are apparently conceived on crack, because they're not even close to being a descriptor of the property. If you're going to use "Isles" in the name, you really shouldn't be located twenty miles inland. If you're calling yourself something with "Palm" in the title, you really oughta go out and plant at least one palm tree, y'know, just to be official about it. And am I some sort of kook for thinking it's weird if you call yourself something-something-harbor or something-something-cove when there's no harbor and no cove?

It's the same everywhere you go, I suppose. I remember back home in Kentucky, one is confronted everywhere one looks by subdivisions with names like "Poplar Estates" and there ain't a damn poplar tree in sight. I imagine if pressed, the developer would say something like, "erm, well, you see, there were poplar trees here before we built these McMansions....."